Greetings from New Haven and Yale Ramona 2011 – 2012! Best wishes for the New Year to you and your families and friends! As you no doubt have noticed, the Mona letter has suffered an unfortunate hiatus. We’re hoping to revive this tradition. Please feel free to send any updates to caroline.jaffe@yale.edu or yaleramona@gmail.com for inclusion in the next newsletter! We would love to hear from you!

Ramona has approximately twenty-seven beautiful, feisty players, led by our fearless captains Claire “Karma” Henly CC ‘12 and Lucila “Chuckles” Dunnington SY ’12. We’ve enjoyed welcoming a great batch of rookies to the Mona family this fall.

This fall has been replete with old traditions and some new surprises. In early September, we played the first day of Metro East club sectionals. We went 3-1, beating Columbia and a couple of high school teams. After learning that most of our opponents had bailed on the second day of sectionals (it was the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, so we figured that traffic getting into New York would be brutal), we decided to go to a nearby beach instead. We enjoyed a rousing round-robin 3v3 beach tournament and went apple picking afterwards.

In early October, we attended Huck for Red October at Vassar College, which is the “new Purple Valley” in that it is a co-ed “party” tournament. In super muddy conditions, we made it all the way to the championship game, losing tragically to Wesleyan on universe point on Sunday. We obviously won the party though. We had great rookie turnout as well as superb showings by many returners. We even played an all-rookie point!

We hosted Coffee Cup over Halloween weekend here in New Haven. Thanks to our stellar Tournament Directors, we had fantastic snacks and a well-organized tournament schedule. Ramona split X-Y, with an overall record of 3-1. Notably, due to low numbers and injuries, both teams played savage (or nearly savage). The tournament included exciting wins over UConn, Brown and Boston University. Despite surprisingly glorious weather early in the morning, it started snowing like crazy around 11:00 am, and we unfortunately had to cancel the rest of games on Saturday and all Sunday games. Nonetheless, playing in a near-white-out snowstorm is something we won’t forget for a while.

In November, we travelled to Princeton, NJ for Fall Brawl. This tournament was an excellent showcase of the skills and fitness we had been working on all semester. With low numbers, both rookies and returners were important contributors to our impressive record of 5-1, earning us 2nd place overall in the tournament.

In addition to our tournaments, we had a casual small-sided Supermona tournament in mid-October. The weather was gorgeous and we had a blast! We also sent a small but stacked Supermona cohort to chilly Get Ho Ho Ho in Falmouth, MA in early December.

The merriment has continued off the field as well. Supermona social has organized some fantastic gatherings, often including baking, Scattergories, movies, and cheery beverages. We’ve enjoyed visits from several recent alumnae at Coffee Cup, the Harvard-Yale game, and at various times throughout the semester. Visiting alumnae include Chelsea “Charks” Willett ’11, Aki Younge ’11, Sarah “Flip” Hill ’11, Zuzana “Zu” Culakova ’11, Alexandra “Lex” Beautyman ’11, Sarah Dewey ’10, Virginia Calkins ’10 and Emily “Thatch” Guh ’09. (I apologize if your name was left off the list; I was probably too “distracted” to remember seeing you…) We would love to see more of you all!

As the semester starts up, we are getting psyched for winter training and winter league. Although our tournament schedule is not currently finalized (and often remains so until frighteningly late into the semester!), some weekends to keep an eye out for are:

March 6-8: Hide Tide on St. Simon’s Island, GA
March 10-11: Music City Mashup in Nashville, TN
March 24-25: Yale Cup at Yale!!!

We will try to be diligent about updating you as this schedule changes. As always, any news, photos, memories, visits and donations are welcomed! We would love to hear from you!